


Till time and times are done

by honeynoir (bracelets)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-14
Updated: 2012-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-09 22:48:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/459356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bracelets/pseuds/honeynoir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the Library, River looks for him in every book ever written.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Till time and times are done

**Author's Note:**

> For the [watch_them_run](http://watch_them_run.livejournal.com) ficathon and the prompt: _River/Doctor (any)- Epilogue to 'Forest of the Dead'. River looks for him in every book ever written._
> 
> Title from Yeats' [The Song of Wandering Aengus](http://www.poetry-archive.com/y/the_song_of_wandering_aengus.html).
> 
> * * *

  
It’s her birthday. Or, more accurately, it feels like it could be. Any excuse to see her team in fancy dress. The Library has dedicated several continents to Celebration/Parties, and thus it’s been her birthday for quite a while. It’s been a lovely string of parties. In fact, it’s been an amazing, wonderful, gravity-defying, completely adult string of parties. (Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother (Perrault’s) is watching the children.)

But. For the first time in a long, long time, the Doctor isn’t there.

Sore and full of cake, she leaves the renditions of a trampoline fest on a nameless asteroid to the tender mercies of her friends. When they ask why she’s leaving, she cites nostalgia. She figures she’s allowed some by now.

She has time like never before, and the Library is like the worst kept photo album in the universe. Every book ever written. Some of those books contain the Doctor.

She lets CAL choose works from all fields, at random. She reads, hears, feels, lives words. It’s dazzling and dizzying… and disappointing.

Oh, there are obscure references, tens of thousands of them: the healer, the physician, the great warrior, the wizard, the angel, the destroyer.

There are books that mention a scarf/an umbrella/a cheery cravat/a waistcoat/celery. They epitomise a monocle/an umbrella/funny shoestrings/an unlikely hairstyle. There are unnecessary adjectives.

Some mention armies. Some mention specific people. Some mention brave girls and boys. Most of them mention a blue box.

There’s freedom/darkness/awe/abandonment/life/all kinds of horrors/death/. He’s infinitely kind and/or remorseless. He’s wise/a fool. He’s sad/giddy. He’s seven feet tall and has a glowing weapon/he’s an everyman and he makes the children laugh.

There are a few brilliant, brilliant sentences where it feels like he’s waving at her, if for a mere second.

He’s in thousands upon thousands of biographies, as ‘the mysterious Doctor’, ‘the elusive Doctor’, ‘the nefarious Doctor’, ‘the remarkable Doctor’. Newman’s Journal of Impossible Things and the memoirs of Madame de Pompadour come closest to the truth — and they’re still a long, long way off.

He’s done a good job erasing himself from history. That’s the way he wants it. So arrogant, and so private.

Some time after the first million books, she can’t help but think: all the books ever written, and this is all that’s left of him.

After the second million, she acknowledges that it’s undoubtedly unhealthy to go on — and that that ship sailed a long, long time ago.

She finds a copy of a Shakespeare script in his hand, a badly-spelled rant on the terrible Merlin, eyewitness accounts from Pluto, Messaline, Mars, the Starship UK, Earth, Earth, Earth. She finds her own thesis — so heavily edited it’s about nothing in particular. She finds decrees by the Shadow Proclamation and the Time Agency, she finds something that must have started out as a file in some Torchwood archive, she finds transcripts of speeches Kovarian made. She finds the original version of the fairytale called ‘The Doctor & Miranda’; the one in which they actually melt.

Just bits and pieces. They’re familiar and unexciting; she was brought up on them.

 

 

It takes an embarrassingly long time until she notices the pattern. At first, there are little, little clues, in boring, boring books. A misplaced comma and a runaway umlaut, a bit of faulty code and a clumsy turn of phrase. Like a step-stone bridge. It’s ‘hello sweetie’ for someone who has a lot of time and no time machine.

Soon, she sees glimpses, proper ones, of him; in fact and fiction, letters and lists, mathematical formulas and picture books; in countless languages. In _Death in the Clouds_ , _Bridget Jones’s Diary_ and _The Time Machine_. In books that everyone’s read; in books that are forgotten.

Word by word, she pieces together silly anecdotes, and sombre run-on sentences, and some of the best worst jokes he’s ever told.

Searching for the next word in a riveting story involving a picture frame and an ice cream cone, she walks into a dull, white room with a dull, white carpet and a palm tree and —

The Doctor sitting on a barrel. He’s young-faced and wears a bright red bowtie, and he almost, almost meets her eyes, though it’s obvious he can’t really see her. “Hello!” He spreads his arms. “Grab a barrel, forget about ice cream, and listen. I’m going to tell you a story. It starts in a library…”


End file.
